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At GDC 2009, Double Fine invited the gaming press for an embargoed meeting to …

It's easy to be mean, to make fun of something and tear it down. It's much harder to poke fun at something that can be rather silly, and have it come from a place of love and deep respect. Tim Schafer has mastered the latter with Br�tal Legend, an adventure game that is at times a love letter to heavy metal, and at others a great excuse to make fun of the chrome-soaked, sex-obsessed conventions of the music.

During GDC 2009, Double Fine hosted a group of game writers at its offices, giving the press a small taste of the game, with Schafer's commentary. "I always wanted to bring this world to life," he told everyone. "What you see in rock videos, it's never really done with much of a budget or fidelity to it at all. Even though the lyrics are so evocative, there's always that one guy standing in the middle of an empty church with a plastic sword."

Schafer said that every scene was designed to look like the cover of a metal album, and the design work is at the same time darkly gothic and utterly ridiculous.

The story takes place in an alternate universe where the power of rock is real. Jack Black plays Eddie Riggs, the so-called "best roadie in the world." After dripping blood onto an amulet that Riggs wears as a belt-buckle, he's transported to a land that looks exactly like the stage set from his former band... except in this world the druids are out to kill him. The first combat erupts, you meet the beautiful sidekick character, build a car to get around, and get your mission: the leaders of the resistance have no idea how to organize, feed, or move people in great numbers. Eddie realizes instantly that they don't need a hero... they need a roadie.

Metal luminary and scream-master Rob Halford provides the voice of the game's bad guy, and an early mission has you rescuing head-banging metalheads who will soon make up your user-controlled army. In a fun twist, the evil minions are hair metal fans... the true enemies of real metal. The hair-metal fans and your army will clash, as Schafer explains, "just like in LA in the 80s."

From that point on Riggs can call on his army to fight for him, adding a strategic element to the rather simplistic hack-and-slash gameplay we had seen up to that point. You'll be able to explore the land using your car—called the Deuce—and the world is huge, 64 square kilometers. You'll be driving around to move the story forward and to take on side missions to upgrade your weapon and car, giving the game some serious legs.

The fact is, the game is funny—laugh-out-loud, subtle, quick-witter humor that comes from a great script and attention to detail. The art is also amazing, with a ton of detail and little surprises to be found here and there. All throughout the game classic metal tracks are played in the background, along with rejiggered metal that comes together into a classic track at just the right time. (We were told many of the rights still weren't completely secured.)

You'll be fighting with your guitar, driving in your metal hot-rod, and hopefully getting it on some with groupies here and there throughout the game... it's hard to image how the game would catch a Teen rating based on what we saw.

After the game was dropped by Activision, only to be picked up by EA, there was a lot of speculation about just how viable the product would be. "In many ways, it was easier to pitch the second time," Schafer said, "since we had something to show." EA was right to pick this one up, it's funny, smart, and lovingly crafted. Sadly, Schafer is known more for critical acclaim than retail receipts these days, but this could be just the game to change that trend.

25 Reader Comments

The "best roadie in the world" looks very much like Michael Weikath from Helloween :-)

(For the uninitiated, Helloween are German metal band who took what Iron Maiden built, moved everything to another level on Keeper of the Seven Keys parts I & II and made Irons look almost silly in the process.)

So, does this mean the gameplay is just okay? I love Psychonauts to death, so it's nice to hear the art and story design is still great, but I was hoping they could have improved their gameplay design.

Originally posted by kitko:(For the uninitiated, Helloween are German metal band who took what Iron Maiden built, moved everything to another level on Keeper of the Seven Keys parts I & II and made Irons look almost silly in the process.)

Originally posted by kitko:(For the uninitiated, Helloween are German metal band who took what Iron Maiden built, moved everything to another level on Keeper of the Seven Keys parts I & II and made Irons look almost silly in the process.)

Oh yeah, I'm big fan of Tim Schafer now thanks to Psychonauts I also played the demo for Grim Fandango ages ago, but never bought the full copy -- big mistake, and by the time I realized, I couldn't find it. Hopefully GoG.com will get their hands on it (and Full Throttle too), as I'm not keen on spending $30+ through Amazon.

My hope for the Brütal Legend soundtrack: Classic heavy metal like Priest, Maiden, Dio, Mercyful Fate... maybe even some ridiculous stuff like Manowar or Helloween or Piledriver. Thrash (Kreator or Sodom or Razor) or death/black metal (Dissection or Nile) would work, and the latter genre has clearly been inspiration for Metalocalypse. But if they decide to be hip and throw in modern screamo-metalcore crap, I might have to find a chainsaw...

On umlauts: I always liked the Y in Queensrÿche, though Spinal Tap gets credit for the N (which isn't ASCII-supported). Infernäl Mäjesty gets points for the double, though I'm sure they're not the only one.

Originally posted by kitko:(For the uninitiated, Helloween are German metal band who took what Iron Maiden built, moved everything to another level on Keeper of the Seven Keys parts I & II and made Irons look almost silly in the process.)

Sure, Chameleon is not a metal album but if a non-metal band recorded that CD, it would be pronounced "critically acclaimed" for style variety, great songwriting, instrumental skills and perfect production.